I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.